I loosely translated the Indian Caste System to reflect the classes in America:

1 Brahmin: Intellectual and Cultural Elites
2 Kshatriya: Bureaucrats and State Supported Functionaries
3 Vaishya: Private Sector Businessmen and Skilled Tradesmen
4 Shudra: Unskilled and Semi-skilled Workers
5 Dalit: Welfare and Criminal Classes

Much of our current political rhetoric seems to be explained by class 1 trying to convince:

* class 2 that they are an important and integral part of class 1,
* class 5 that they are really, truly fighting on their side,
* class 4 not to join political forces with class 3, and
* class 3 to just shut up and obey their intellectual and moral superiors.

The biggest problem for the intellectual and cultural elites arises when everyone they’re trying to convince realize they’ve been deceived.

Beware the March of IDE.

How Much Would Open Borders Cost Americans?

One country.

David Heinemeier Hansson and Jamie Heinemeier Hansson. Are these SJWs that took each others family name to signal how enlightened they are?

What’s interesting in the article was the eventual fate of the Molokans. After legally acquiring the land from the Mexican government in the first decade of the 20th century, the Molokans worked hard to build up their farms and towns:

In carefully preserved photographs and home movies, the early decades of life at the colony have the appearance of a sun-drenched utopia. … The farms prospered as well. Neat rows of alfalfa and grapevines marched up and down the lushly rolling valley.

That utopia, however, eventually came to an unhappy end:

The idyll ended in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hundreds of landless Mexican settlers streamed into town. They stormed up to the farms and announced they were taking over, saying the Molokans weren’t real Mexicans.

“They put on hats like Pancho Villa and carried signs that said, ‘Death to the Russians,’ ” said Augustin Lopez, who is part Russian.

The Molokans pleaded with them. They showed a signed proclamation from Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, granting their rights to the land.

“They didn’t consider you a Mexican citizen,” said George Mohoff, who was born and raised in the Guadalupe Valley, but now lives in Los Angeles County. “They said, ‘Why do you have so much and we have so little?’ ”

But the Molokans were pacifists, unwilling to use guns and fists to hold on to their land. The settlers kept coming, and the Molokans “were left with broken hearts,” Mohoff said.

I’ll leave the 21st century parallels as an exercise for the readers.

Don’t forget the Russian Molokans of Baja California:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-01-me-molokans1-story.html

Consanguinity is only one of the poisoned fruits of polygamy, but it’s a big one. The graph above dove-tails nicely with the one in the link below.

Accents? Here are two:

Even Indonesia is getting into the floating reactor game, through the startup ThorConPower:

http://thorconpower.com/design/

On the other hand, Thomas Aquinas College, a traditional Catholic liberal arts college near Santa Barbara, has just opened a second campus in Massachusetts. Needless to say, blue hair and tattoos are not big there.

Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, as a plot element, in “The Sixth Sense” (Spoiler Alert!)

I’m so old that I remember that the question was “Are achievement gaps related to nutrition gaps?” That was before de facto universal school lunch programs.

Hrdy means “Proud” in Czech. That is all.

Ivan St******vich is not a Czech name. More likely Bulgarian, or perhaps Serbian.

In: Intersectionality enforced by law
Out: Equality under the law

Steve, you didn’t mention Chirac’s famous “Le Bruit et L’Odeur” speech, which detailed some difficulties France was having assimilating Muslim immigrants and which, of course, was roundly denounced by the bien pensants of France. Perhaps his opposition was also a bit of fence mending with his “restive Muslim population”, which I’m guessing was inclined to distrust him after that speech.

According to Belloc, in his essay On Usury:

It must be remarked that one of the principal factors of success in the Mohammedan over-running of half Christendom between the 7th and 8th centuries was its active penalizing of Usury. This leading tenet of Islam in its social morals gave immediate relief to myriads of debtors in North Africa, Syria and Mesopotamia.

It appears for many mired in debt slavery, Islam was indeed as a salvation.

https://oldthunderbelloc.blogspot.com/2014/01/on-usury.html

Fun Fact: If you watch season 1 episode 3 of Cheers, its starts out the gang watching a Red Sox game on TV with Carl Yazstrzremski batting with 2 outs at the bottom of the 9th with the tying run on base. He ends popping out to the disappointment of the crowd and Carla angrily proclaims she’s not a Red Sox fan anymore. The interesting thing is the guy calling the game in the Cheers episode is Jon Miller, one of the current announcers for the Giants. So, in the 80s, Miller was calling games that Carl Yazstrzemski was playing in, and now in 2019, he’s calling games his grandson Mike is playing in.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the clip on youtube with Miller calling the game, but this is Carla’s response after the pop up:

Comedienne’s Corollary to Sailer’s Law

The most snarky articles by comediennes tend to be demands that norms of humor be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the comediennes will be considered funnier than comedians.

Q: What’s the difference between Michael Jackson and Joe Biden?
A: Joe Biden was the King of Popcorn.

Apropos of nothing, Ocasek means “little tail” in Czech.

After all, creeks running year round in the dry Hollywood Hills aren’t natural.

Neither is green grass. So there’s that.

The new utopian order where hierarchy, patriarchy, sexism, racism, cis-normism and every other bad thing will be abolished and we will live in a world of egalitarianism where no one will rule over the other and everyone will have his needs met.

Of course, the new utopian order will need its highly compensated, rightfully powerful, and not-at-all corrupt leaders and administrators, who will make all the correct decisions for the masses. It’s only fair. Otherwise the whole revolution would suffer.

(It’s amazing how this swindle works over and over again.)

Does this mean that 23andMe needs to close up shop?

Broadly speaking, sub-Saharan Africa tends toward gerontocratic cultures in which men are deemed to deserve to accumulate power, money, and wives by outliving their rivals.

This, I think, is one of the poisonous fruits of culturally sanctioned polygamy.

One of the first return salvos in the culture war’s battle against monogamy was William Tucker’s “Monogamy and its Discontents”, which was published back in 1993.

http://djole.altervista.org/djole/SchoolPage/TCC/101/ReadNotes/MonogamyDiscontents.htm

An excellent essay; nevertheless, it lightly touches on polygamy and doesn’t go into too much detail. He followed up with additional essays showing the various social pathologies that often are associated with polygamous societies (high rates of consanguinous marriages, tribalism, sexual violence, etc.).

Still, the article is insightful and very quotable. I leave you with its conclusion:

Family values are basically the belief that monogamy is the most peaceful and progressive way of organizing a human society. Dislike and distaste for anything that challenges the monogamous contract easy divorce, widespread pornography, legalized prostitution, out-of-wedlock child bearing, blatant homosexuality-are not just narrow or prudish concerns. They come from an intelligent recognition that the monogamous contract is a fragile institution that can easily unravel if dissaffections become too widespread.

What is likely to happen if we abandon these values? People will go on reproducing, you can be sure of that. But families won’t be formed (“litters” might be a more appropriate term). And the human beings that are produced in these litters will not be quite the same either. If marriage is a compromise between men and women, then the breakdown of monogamy can only let loose the natural egocentrisms of both.

It is probably not too alarmist to note that societies that have been unable to establish monogamy have also been unable to create working democracies or widely distributed wealth. No society that domesticates too few men can have a stable social order. People who are incapable of monogamy are probably incapable of many other things as well.

As a basically limiting human compact, monogamous marriage is bound to produce its peculiar difficulties. As with any compromise, each individual can argue based on present or previous deprivation, real or imagined-that he or she should not be bound by the rules.

Yet it should also be clear that, beyond the personal dissatisfactions we all may feel, each of us also retains a permanent, private stake in sustaining a system that creates a peaceful social order and offers to everyone a reasonable chance of achieving personal happiness. If monogamy makes complex demands on human beings, it also offers unique and complex rewards.

We all know what Virtue Signallers are: those who ostentatiously proclaim their alignment with the progressive canon as a way of getting kudos in their left wing bubble and likes at DailyKos.

There is, however, something called a Virtue Swindler. It’s the person that encourages the Virtue Signaller to adopt politically correct views, even (and sometimes especially) if it is ultimately detrimental to Virtue Signaller.

David Simon strikes me as a Virtue Swindler. And, there is nothing that makes a Virtue Swindler so mad as when their marks don’t fall for the swindle.

People who are tribally oriented are rarely grateful, likely due due their diminished capacity for altruism.

“The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method –by making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses –you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole strategem. But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. ”

— Uncle Screwtape

Jon Entine covered this ground in his book Taboo in 2000. Why is this news?

Re: Farmer Strength. I’ve often wondered if the scriptural passage “By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food” is more of an exhortation than a punishment, pointing out how man, now fallen and out of paradise, should lead his life. Same principle applies to women: “with painful labor you will give birth to children”.

My son said that when asked at college what his gender and pronouns are, he’d consider saying Trump-sexual with pronouns tree, trim, and tris. For the lolz.

I reminded him that lefty tolerance is extremely selective.

Genesis 1:27

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

This is battlespace preparation. The New York Times will soon pivot to saying all billionaires are predators, especially Trump. Nothing more than narrative engineers plying their trade.

The book of Wisdom, at the end of chapter one, describes the ungodly in ways are an excellent description of the modern atheist progressive or political gnostic:

But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death;
considering him a friend, they pined away
and made a covenant with him,
because they are fit to belong to his company.

It continues on in chapter 2, describing the cynicism, epicurianism, libido dominandi, love of power and cruelty of the ungodly:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Wisdom+2&version=NRSVACE

and ends with a rebuke:

Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray,
for their wickedness blinded them,
and they did not know the secret purposes of God,
nor hoped for the wages of holiness,
nor discerned the prize for blameless souls;
for God created us for incorruption,
and made us in the image of his own eternity,
but through the devil’s envy death entered the world,
and those who belong to his company experience it.

This is a classic use of the leftist’s use of argumentum ad populum, the common knowledge fallacy, except that his version common knowledge is that which nearly all leftists are certain is true.

Which brings us back to Reagan, who said: “The problem isn’t that liberals are ignorant, it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

There is a positive (unstable) feedback loop here: the Democrats radicalize the NYT, the NYT radicalizes the Democrats. It won’t stop until it spins out of control.

I’m old enough to remember when Coleman Hawkins had Body and Soul.

This reminds me of the Spectator article “A Revolt in Queens” which recounts the history of when a left wing education supremo and his radical sex education program was stymied by a coalition of conservative and Hispanic activists. Their chief counter-revolutionist (and a hero of mine) was Irene Impellizeri, a Chesterton quoting intellectual.

Will history repeat itself?

If your equations are correct, then bad = 2 or 0. Just saying.

One of these days, there’ll be a QB who is truly ambidextrous and can throw equally well left and right handedly. Like Pat Venditte in baseball. That option will completely throw off the defense, and probably the offense as well.

Also: Hendrik Bode, Shannon’s boss, who collaborated with Shannon on his seminal work. The inventor of many basic mathematical approaches that electrical engineers use everyday, and some that most have forgotten or that are no longer being taught. A genius, and from all accounts, genial. I once asked Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser, about Bode (he worked with him at Bell Labs too), and he had nothing but praise for him.

All of this is so transparent.

The progressive left wants to turn Europe into a multi-racial paradise. It’s not working out very well: Identitarian movements are springing up opposing it, threatening the immanentization of their eschaton The rhetorical counter-response of the progressive left to this is “How can you, in good faith, oppose this? Europe has always been multi-racial !!11!”

It’s 1917 all over again, except it’s race instead of class. Same swindle, different con.

People thought Harry J. Marshall and Robin Warren were crazy when they suggested that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers. Two decades later, they won the Nobel prize for Medicine for their discovery.

I have been fascinated by the efforts, started by Joseph Hooker in the mid-1800s, to terraform Green Mountain on Ascension Island. Before his efforts, the mountain peak was dry and home only to “spiky grasses”. Afterwards, it was a damp cloud forest that was “completely vegetated, including areas of dense trees and bushes, interspersed with some grassy slopes. The variety of plants includes banana, ginger, juniper, raspberry, coffee, ferns, fig trees, Cape Yews, and Norfolk Island pines.”

In other words, a complete success. Still, in recent articles on the subject, you can hear a tone of lament concerning Hooker’s efforts. Anti-Multicultivarism is now the order of the day.

The first amendment protecting speech is not so much saying that all speech is good, but rather, the government is wholly incompetent in determining what is good and what isn’t, especially with regard to political speech. Over my adult lifetime, I’ve seen free speech eroded to the extent that what is being censored are uncomfortable or impolitic truths.

I’m still mourning the loss of the old Shasta Ski Bowl.

http://activenorcal.net/history/the-turbulent-history-of-mt-shastas-old-ski-bowl/

Just south of Tahoe off of Hwy 89 there is what would seem to be a perfect ski mountain: Waterhouse Peak. Relatively easy to get to, north facing, relatively mild slopes, 1600′ vertical drop, and already a favorite of back-country skiers. If I were a developer, I would be eyeing this location, particularly given the fact that most Tahoe ski resorts are bursting at the seams. It seems, though, that ski resort development is somehow in the same category of dam building: It’s just something that is no longer done.

Back to SoCal, though: What about Pine Mountain at 9600′, at the end of Lytle Creek Canyon, just north of Mount Baldy?

A Czech tongue twister:

Třistatřicet tři stříbrných stříkaček stříkalo přes třistatřicet tři stříbrných střech

333 silver nozzles squirted (water) through 333 silver roofs

In the not to distant future most Americans will recognize that open border / invite the world policies were complicit in the destruction of our nation. When that happens, the people will turn against the neo-babelists: clerics, corporatists, globalists, and a whole swath of leftists.

Not only does she speak with a vocal fry, but also with a very nasal voice. As I call it, snorkel fry.

Japan:China::Austria:Hungary

I heard a lot of complaints when the Austrian borders were opened and Hungarians and their littering habit came in. Maybe that’s changed, but it was the case in the 80s.

Hoop earrings. You forgot hoop earrings!

Trump makes Solnit so mad she could boil a rabbit. She is not going to be ignored!

But the conventional wisdom is merely that feminism can’t possibly fail, all the evidence that it has just proves it hasn’t been tried good and hard enough.

The beratings will continue until morale improves….

Morally Depraved: Sending a pipe bomb.

Above + Politically Uncivil: Sending a pipe bomb to a political figure.

Above + Feckless: Sending a pipe bomb to already irrelevant political figure.

Above + Moronic: Sending an already irrelevant political figure a pipe bomb in the hopes that it makes him relevant.

Can I condemn all 4 all at once?

Horde not hoard. Duh. Although benefit hoarding hordes is possible too.

Caravan. Too Neutral. How about: Welfare hoard?

If you’ve read any Agatha Christie, you’ll know that there was a big interest in spiritualism/occult in England in the 1920s.

Question: Is Trump the Billy Beane of politics? It seems to me there have been a number of very popular political positions (e.g., restriction of immigration and late term abortion, fair trade and tariffs, low taxes, etc.) that no one would touch before Trump, and yet, they represented high return / low investment political strategies that, looking back, are pretty obvious.

Even looking at the way Trump campaigned, it was Billy Beane all the way. Maximize electoral votes for each dollar spent.

Or simply misoleukism (Miss – ALL – luke – ism). Literally: white hatred, which is as contemptible as any other racial bigotry.

If it would be a crime against humanity to send immigrants back to a nonwhite country, then why have them stay in a country that is becoming increasingly nonwhite due to mass immigration?

Shorter Edward Chen: Heads I win, tails you lose.

Any comment that has a reference to Josef Pieper, the great neoscholastic philosopher of the 20th century, always gets a thumbs up from me.

A week prior to the 9/11 attack, James Woods saw 2 of the attackers on a trial run on the same flight from Boston, and alerted authorities. The FBI ignored it. Another Type 2 error.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/out-of-the-woods-2/

Cue the map of the consanguinity rate around the world…

Apparently, there are millions of dollars to be made off the US Gov’t from the trafficking of children. Just ask Southwest Key….

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1008840390110269441.html

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/21/us/southwest-key-migrant-housing-salary-invs/index.html

Speaking of Minsk and Pinsk:

There’s a scene in My Favorite Year, where Benji Stone’s mother Belle is called out for doing something embarrassing, to which she retorts: “Where do you think I’m from, Minsk Ka-Pinsk?”

William Tucker and Joe Sobran are unsung heros.

Long ago, in 1993, William Tucker wrote an apologia for monogamy, called “Monogamy and its Discontents”. If you look around, you can still find the odd copy of it.

Tucker concludes:

Family values are basically the belief that monogamy is the most peaceful and progressive way of organizing a human society. Dislike and distaste for anything that challenges the monogamous contract – easy divorce, widespread pornography, legalized prostitution, out-of-wedlock child bearing, blatant homosexuality, [+ pervasive hypergamy, promiscuity, polygamy, gender disphoria, etc. ed.]-are not just narrow or prudish concerns. They come from an intelligent recognition that the monogamous contract is a fragile institution that can easily unravel if dissaffections become too widespread.

What is likely to happen if we abandon these values? People will go on reproducing, you can be sure of that. But families won’t be formed (“litters” might be a more appropriate term). And the human beings that are produced in these litters will not be quite the same either. If marriage is a compromise between men and women, then the breakdown of monogamy can only let loose the natural egocentrisms of both.

It is probably not too alarmist to note that societies that have been unable to establish monogamy have also been unable to create working democracies or widely distributed wealth. No society that domesticates too few men can have a stable social order. People who are incapable of monogamy are probably incapable of many other things as well.

As a basically limiting human compact, monogamous marriage is bound to produce its peculiar difficulties. As with any compromise, each individual can argue based on present or previous deprivation, real or imagined-that he or she should not be bound by the rules.

Yet it should also be clear that, beyond the personal dissatisfactions we all may feel, each of us also retains a permanent, private stake in sustaining a system that creates a peaceful social order and offers to everyone a reasonable chance of achieving personal happiness. If monogamy makes complex demands on human beings, it also offers unique and complex rewards.

I heard years ago that they used to make you carve a tooth out of a piece of chalk. If you couldn’t do that, you weren’t fit to be a dentist.

Don’t know if the story was apocryphal or not.

Could Chetty’s results be explained, at least partially, to the distribution of MAOA-2R genes among racial groups?

https://www.selfhacked.com/blog/about-mao-a-and-what-to-do-if-you-have-the-warrior-gene/

Goolag, Faceborg, Fapple? Quelqu’un a traîné au Château Heartiste.

Like anything, the best policy concerning trade is not at the ideological poles. Particularly, when you consider how much off-shoring and excessively free trade has hollowed out life for Heritage America – both black and white.

Ideologues, globalists, and profiteers don’t care about the human aspect of their policies, but a policy that has a punitive effect on a lot of people will eventually be opposed. Fortunately, Trump is just getting ahead of the curve.

Remind me: Who came up with the “Affordable Family Formation” observation? Whoever he was, he’s sure good at noticing.

There’s a story – perhaps apocryphal – that a journalist asked Pope John XXIII how many people worked in the Vatican Curia. Pope John responded “About half.”

“white” people deserve everything they get

The world will be a better place without us

Interesting. In the first sentence the subject is in the third person, in the second the prepositional object is in the first person.

Which is it: we or they?

@ArtDeco: Here’s Ann Coulter’s obituary for Joe Sobran:

http://humanevents.com/2010/10/06/not-your-average-joe/

He should be fondly remember if only for his “New York Destroyed by Earthquake; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.” faux headline.

Age related Tourette’s, or simply dementia related confabulation?

The best commentary / summaries on Twitter are at:

Stealth Jeff and Imperator Rex

The upshot: The malfeasance was noted, the trap was set, the bad guys fell for it, and they’ll all end up in the clink.

I like calling it concatenate migration. Definitely unremarkable, except for the few Latin scholars who’ll note that the root of concatenate is catena, meaning chain.

A reminder: the Institutional Revolutionary Party was in power for 71 years in Mexico, 1929-2000, tossed out and voted back in in 2012.

Mexico is essentially a one party state. That’s what the democrats (and the Bushes, apparently) long for.

In July 2004, Ariel Sharon had a message for French Jews: “If I have to advocate to our brothers in France, I will tell them one thing: Move to Israel as early as possible … I say that to Jews all around the world, but there I think it’s a must …”

For this he was roundly condemned. But was he wrong?

It’s probably not likely, but could it be that this is a setup of Michael Wolff and the MSM?

It’s pretty unnerving when our cultural elites demand Gleichschaltung.

Is the reason that the phrase “It’s ok to be white” rankles Lefties so much is that it demonstrates that a lot of people are noticing the pervasiveness of misoleukist (anti-white) propaganda?

Mrs. Jellyby, a character in Dicken’s Bleak House, spent her time virtue signalling about her philanthropic efforts while completely neglecting her family and her household.

Liberals do the same thing at a national level.

The “American Rule” in law essentially states that any plaintiff who loses a court case is not obliged to pay for the defendant’s legal expenses. This rule, which is unique to American Jurisprudence, was made to work in the past because of our cooperative high-trust society.

Now that we no longer have a cooperative high-trust society, the American rule is used as a means of punitive lawfare by those who would game the system.

We should revert to the more robust loser-pays system that the rest of the world has. And if it hits blue-state left wing lawyers and their clients disproportionately hard, then so be it.

Even our art, particularly movies, seem to be centered around either WWII, the Noble and Tragic American Indian, and the horrors of slavery and the American South. All negative foundational myths.

From Alan Riding’s 1991 NYT article: “IMMIGRANT UNREST ALARMING FRENCH”

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/23/world/immigrant-unrest-alarming-french.html

More unexpectedly, Jacques Chirac, a former Prime Minister who heads the Gaullist Rally for the Republic party, has gone further than ever in blaming President Francois Mitterrand for what he called an “overdose” of immigrants and in appealing to latent xenophobic feelings here.

In a speech Wednesday in Orleans, he spoke of the French worker who lives next door to an immigrant family “with a father, three or four wives, some 20 children, that receives 50,000 francs per month in social welfare, obviously without working.” Fifty thousand francs is equivalent to $8,300.

“Add to that the noise and the smell,” Mr. Chirac went on, “and the French worker goes crazy. It is not racist to say that we no longer have the means to honor the idea of uniting immigrant families.”

Prime Minister Edith Cresson described his remarks as “shocking” and said the Gaullist leader was wooing the National Front for electoral reasons. Her own policy, she said, would continue to be one of tolerance toward immigrants combined with firmness.

I’m glad that IQ is not inheritable. Now I can finally justify buying a cute Irish Setter to herd my sheep!

Red sties and blight: Sailer’s delight.

The statement: “Blacks tend to be the least suicidal race” leads me to wonder: What’s the distribution of the components of the five factor (OCEAN) model as a function of race/ethnicity? Any good links?

Chuck Schumer = Cuck Sooner?

The newsman for the Armstrong and Getty radio show, Marshall Phillips, tells the story about how he lived next door to the apartment of Mario Savio in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 60s. Savio was relatively quiet, but would become enraged if Phillips played his music too loud, pounding on the door to get Phillips to turn his music down.

I’m sure if Mario Savio were still alive, he’d tell Phillips to get the hell off his lawn.

What’s his wife’s name: Jolie Buttafuoque?

The Left, their political arm (Democrats), their entertainment arm (Hollywood), their pedogogical arm (Public Education), and their propaganda arm (MSM) have been feeding America a steady diet of misoleukism (Diversity is our strength!) and misandrosy (Down with the Patriarchy!) for decades.

Whatever. What cracks me up is when the Left wrings its hands and earnestly wonders why white males no longer support them.

Misoleukism, or White hatred, is fashionable on the left and useful as a means of signalling virtue.

The fashion, however, has an expiration date, because to maintain the level of social control that misoleukism affords, the anti-white propaganda need to continually be ratcheted up. At some point, the misoleukist bubble will burst, after which there will be much bien pensant back-pedaling.

Among the classic novelists, Jane Austen (1775-1817) has been the most reliable moneymaker over the last generation.

I was disappointed that Jane Austen’s Mafia! was not included in the list at IMDB.

Folks:

This is all coordinated from Beijing. My office mate from Berkeley told me a story of a fellow graduate student from China who received a e-mail from the consular office in San Francisco instructing her to protest the Dalai Lama when he came to town. She, dutifully, went to what was a pretty nasty demonstration.

In other words, Beijing is exploiting our freedoms for its policy goals. Nice.